In the mid-1990s, the late Barry French Sr. burst into his family home, eager to share the new technology he'd been working on in the garage: a groundbreaking new way to track and capture human movement.
The first iterations of technology were impractically large and prohibitively expensive. Though the technology gained national buzz at the time, it wouldn't be until 2017 that the Westlake family company Trazer created its first commercially viable product that can assess, train and rehabilitate users.
Since then, the company has been working steadily to expand its customers for Trazer (a combination of "tracking" and "laser"). Its initial client base was found among NCAA Division I schools. It has expanded to include various clinics and physical therapy centers and other care providers.
The technology combines gaming-based brain training tools with a motion-capture lab that digitally records and measures the body's movement. It's a tool to accurately measure and objectively quantify movement, allowing users to track improvement or degradation of quality and performance, which can be hugely important in performance enhancement and returning athletes to play after a concussion or other injury.
"The brain drives everything we do," said Barry French Jr., who remembers sitting on the couch with his brother when his father excitedly announced the technology. Today's, he's CEO of Trazer. "You cannot assess, treat or enhance performance, for example, without integrating the brain and body together," French said.
After initially working primarily in the athletic and sports medicine space (both in performance enhancement and rehabilitation), Trazer last year entered the senior care market, aiming to help assess and mitigate fall risk.
Trazer adds math problems or color challenges that prompt the individual to physically move to solve the answers, allowing providers to look at brain health, musculoskeletal ability and performance of the body at the same time "to not only look at what area is affected but how can we improve the holistic human," French said.
The company raised about $3 million in initial seed money through angels and is out for a post-seed round seeking another $1.5 million, French said. That, he thinks, will help Trazer execute on some key initiatives, including its "huge growth potential," he said. Today, Trazer has 105 of its units in the field with 87 clients.
Recognizing that no one on the Trazer team is a clinician, the approach has been to get the technology in the hands of clinicians who can find the best use for it. Trazer then learns from those clients, standardizing and objectifying the approaches for everyone.
"By putting it in the hands of the clinicians, taking the technology, getting the technology in a place where it was really usable, putting it in the hands of some of the best in the world and then learning from them is — I think, for looking at how to make companies successful in the long term — is really valuable," said Kyle Frantz, chief strategy officer for Trazer.
This allows the users to drive how the technology works, which is ultimately what brought Trazer to the senior care space. Its largest physical therapy client came to the team and said it wanted to take the service into assisted living, independent living and memory care for seniors. In a 2,000-person census, the client saw a 30% reduction in falls in just one year.
"It's not enough to just assess risk of fall, which we do and we do very, very well, but you have to mitigate, too," French said. "And again, Trazer's a unique tool that can do both."
Dr. Joseph Congeni, medical director of sports medicine at Akron Children's Hospital, was introduced to earlier versions of the Trazer technology a couple of decades ago and has since seen it progress. The technology is currently at Akron Children's for a research project, but it isn't in use at the moment as the project is in limbo after a fellow moved away.
Congeni said he'd like to see the technology available to patients. He sees it as a useful tool in concussion treatment and making return-to-play decisions for athletes following an injury. The technology allows clinicians to see any asymmetry or weakness after a musculoskeletal injury to determine whether the patient is going to be able to respond to the demands of the sport that they want to return to, without having to actually expose them back out on the field.
"Particularly in contact or collision sports ... we use clinical testing, office testing, history, how do you feel — you know, those kind of things that have a lot of subjectivity to them," Congeni said. "And what I liked about the Trazer technology is it had a lot of objectivity to it."
The team at Trazer sees its technology as having a meaningful impact on countless people's lives in many areas: clinical, research, athletic, senior care, health care spaces.
"How do we maximize that impact?" Frantz said. "How do we take what we've learned from these best in the world and make that approachable and accessible and usable across different populations and to different people? That's the fun part."
"care" - Google News
February 23, 2020 at 04:00PM
https://ift.tt/38TgTEU
Trazer finding room to grow in sports rehab, senior care - Crain's Cleveland Business
"care" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2N6arSB
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Trazer finding room to grow in sports rehab, senior care - Crain's Cleveland Business"
Post a Comment